For various applications, designs need to be applied to various substrates using thermal heat transfer methods, such as decorating a wide range of surfaces. For example, T-Shirts are often decorated using heat applied transfers. The designs are either digitally printed or screen printed to a transfer media as mirror images and then heat is applied to the final substrate.
Typical application of printed thermal heat transfers is achieved using a variety of print methods such as digital electrostatic laser printers or inkjet printers, and analog methods such as manual screen printing. However, these known methods have a limited print size. Therefore, the design is limited to a maximum printable size.
Further, conventional image tiling which produces rectangular segments from the original image with a slight overlap, results in straight line seams that are easily visible and result in objectionable artifacts. Even if these tiled segments are aligned with no overlap, there is a very high occurrence of visible seams that are objectionable to the human eye. Further, simple edge-based segmentation used in existing technologies do not provide a solution for cases where large solid areas having no edges must be split.
The ability to print and transfer a design that is larger than the printable area of any given print method is highly desirable. There is a high demand for the ability to process larger digital image designs to produce segmented transfers which can be seamlessly applied with no artifacts.
Therefore, there is a need for improved methods, systems, apparatuses and devices for facilitating printing of a digital image based on image splitting that may overcome one or more of the above-mentioned problems and/or limitations.